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10 points to consider before deploying an e-mail archive

10 points to consider before deploying an e-mail archive Selecting an e-mail archiving application based solely on functionality may result in unexpected administration costs. As storage shops implement e-mail archiving, many of them are confronting issues related to a company's vertical industry or the capabilities/maturity of the IT organization and its e-mail user community. The best practices presented here--which are focused on archiving for Microsoft Exchange--will ease some implementation, operational and maintenance concerns. Your firm's industry will determine how you implement e-mail archiving. If financial compliance is a key driver, the emphasis will be on proof points and mandated retention policies. For organizations susceptible to expensive legal discovery actions, retention and ease of retrieval will be paramount; firms with similar requirements might also need sophisticated search criteria. Other implementation issues are related more to company size than to specific industries. For example, some firms have ...

Today's high-speed tape drives can outrun a network, causing the drive to have to wait for a data stream. This shoe-shining effect can be overcome, but only if you make disk your primary backup target.

Negotiating backup service-level agreements (SLAs) can be one of the toughest elements of transitioning IT from a mere technology competence center to a real part of the business. Detailing what a backup service will provide, and figuring out how to measure and report on these promises, will greatly improve enterprise storage operations.

Storage managers in New Orleans thought their disaster recovery (DR) plans were solid. Hurricane Katrina showed them otherwise. These dramatic stories are testimony that a DR plan is worthless unless it's been tested, updated and then tested again.

Veritas NetBackup 6.0 is a significant revision of the popular backup application but, like many new software versions, it has had its share of bugs. Did Symantec release Version 6.0 too soon, or did users fail to plan properly?

E-mail has earned mission-critical status among enterprise applications, and reliable storage systems are the key to keeping it up and running. Storage managers need to understand Microsoft Exchange's unique requirements to ensure its high availability.

While it's possible to restore data from old backups, you shouldn't use them as archives. Leading storage expert W. Curtis Preston details the differences between the two technologies and explains why you need an e-mail archiving program.

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Thirty-one percent of organizations say they'll experience significant revenue loss or another adverse business impact within one hour or less of application downtime--it's no wonder organizations are "rethinking" their data protection strategies.

Some new advances in backup, such as virtual tape libraries, represent evolutionary enhancements to the traditional backup process, while others like continuous data protection and single-instance storage are potentially far more transformational.

You've probably come to realize the importance of encryption in securing your storage environment. To do the job right, you don't have to become a security guru, but you do need to learn about encryption key management. Here's how to get started.